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After my visits in 2016 and 2017, I also visited the Comic Con Germany in Stuttgart (site map of the main hall) last Saturday. It was once again a lot of fun. I met several German comic artists, bought comics and original artwork, and saw an enormous number of cosplayers with great costumes. In this post, you can have a look at all the photos I took with some added commentary. You can click on each photo to see a larger version of it.

While it was still quite crowded on midday and the early afternoon, there were fewer visitors compared to the last two years. According to a newspaper article there were around 40,000 visitors instead of 50,000 visitors. That led to a better experience overall because making your way through the crowded floors was often a challenge in the last years. I hope that the convention stabilizes at the current visitor number to area ratio in the future.

In the first part of my article, I want to give you an impression of several parts of the fair. In the second part, I want to show you some of the artists that were present there and the comics and artwork I bought from them. The area where independent artists showed their work was significantly increased in size this year. In the third part, I want to show some amazing cosplayers. In the last part, I want to show you some impressions from the massive LEGO area.

Last Saturday, I posted the places 11 to 20 of my favorite Sandra and Woo strips from the last 499 published strips. So, here is the top 10! (In July 2013, I already posted my 20 favorite strips from the first 499 strips: places 11 to 20, places 1 to 10.)

In this post, I present you the places 11 to 20 from my 20 favorite strips from the strips numbered #501 to #999. The 500th strip The Book Of Woo is not included in the list since I will discuss it separately next week. It’s clearly the best Sandra and Woo strip ever published if you ask me. I will post my top 10 next week.

Such a list does not always give the full picture, though. I’m quite fond of the current swimming center story arc, for example, but in my opinion it doesn’t feature a specific strip that really stands out.

On 29 April, I finally managed to beat Getting over it with Bennet Foddy in under 10 minutes! After a good number of failed attempts with clear times just above 10 minutes, I eventually achieved a time of 8 min 30 sec 836 msec which would have placed me at position #481 at speedrun.com if I had recorded the run. Since then, I haven’t played Getting over it again since I just cannot do the advanced moves that are necessary for an even better time consistently.

After my challenge to come up with your own Sandra and Woo speedrun, one of our readers, Lasse, actually submitted one:

Here is what he has to say about his submission:

I present to you a speedrun of Sandra and Woo in only 3.7 panels using the famous, but difficult to execute “XSS strategy.” Doesn’t work in the printed comic, only for the browser-variant. Category: Any%.

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Our long-time reader Moatl sent me a ciphertext. In this own words, he took three of my texts, which he calls a “logical” choice, and adjusted them to create the following ciphertext (PDF version):

Since Moatl is German, the base texts may be from our German website. I did not have a thorough look at it yet. But the ciphertext surely look a lot like it’s been written in a shorthand variant. The three paragraphs of the ciphertext certainly correspond to the three texts he spoke of. They are rather short, so my first guess would be that they’re based on the transcripts of Sandra and Woo strips dealing with cryptography.

Time to investigate, I think. I will take the challenge, but next week will be another very busy week for me, so I will do it when I feel like it. You can try it yourself, of course.